The role of perceived intention to deceive in children's and adults' concepts of lying

In three experiments, a total of 89 children aged 5 through 8 years and 87 adults were asked to judge the communicative intentions of protagonists in videotaped or pictorial cartoon stories who made factually true or false utterances under a variety of mental states. The results of Expt 1 highlighted the importance of consulting subjects' own perceptions of speakers' intentions when seeking their ‘lie’ judgements, since adults' attributions of deceptive intent were not always consistent with researchers' a priori ' assumptions. When subjective intent perceptions were matched with definitions of lying in Expts 2 and 3, even 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds were found to base concepts of lying significantly upon their own attribution to speakers of deceptive intent. On the other hand, a substantial minority of adults in Expt 3 defined a truthfully intended lapse of memory as a lie, suggesting that intention to deceive is not the sole criterion for lying, even in adulthood. These results were seen to contradict several aspects of Piaget's (1932/1965) two‐stage theory of the conceptualization of lying. In addition, the results showed that children's attributions of communicative intent were generally similar to adults', especially when the speaker's mental state was unambiguous. So were their concepts of truth telling. Implications of these results for legal applications of Piaget's theory were considered.